The High Court has prohibited the deportation of an Afghan asylum seeker until a court challenge can be heard.

A temporary injunction prevented the deportation of the 65-year-old man on Tuesday.

He is from the minority Hazara community in Uruzgan province, but lived in Pakistan with his family for more than two decades.

Who are the Hazaras?

Though to be of Central Asian decent, most likely from Mongolia and Turkey.

Popular theory is that Hazaras are descendents of Genghis Kahn and his soldiers, who invaded Afghanistan in the 12th century.

Around 7 million live in Afghanistan, in the ethnic region of Hazarajat.

Smaller groups of Hazaras live in Pakistan and Iran.

Hazaras' facial features are distinctly Mongolian, setting them apart from most Afghans.

Most are Shiite Muslims, as opposed to Sunnis who make up 85 per cent of Afghanistan's population.

Many Hazaras were killed or forced out of Afghanistan during conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Historically, they have been oppressed by past governments and openly targeted by the Taliban.

Late this afternoon Justice Virginia Bell found there is a likelihood of success for his challenge to the finding that he could safely return to Kabul.

She said the Refugee Review Tribunal accepted that the man would be persecuted in Uruzgan, and had seen a report finding that at least 11 Afghans refused refugee status had been killed after returning from Australia.

She says the tribunal did not adequately explain why this man would be safe in Kabul.

The case will now go to the Federal Circuit Court.

A solicitor representing the Government on Tuesday argued that the Afghan man had had a chance over the past year to make his application for a stay of deportation and had not done so.

The Government argued that effectively his time was up and the case was over.

Refugee advocate Ian Rintoul says the Federal Government acted with unseemly haste in attempting to remove the man on Tuesday evening.

"Regardless of what you think about the wider issues, I don't anyone would find that an acceptable way for the government to act, to simply take a 65-year-old asylum seeker who hasn't been in Afghanistan for 27 years and dump them at the airport in Kabul," he said.

"That's what the government has done, that's why it is unseemly."

Man has lost contact with relatives in Afghanistan

The man at the centre of the case is illiterate and has lost contact with relatives back home. He says he fled persecution in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Sonia Caton, a lawyer and chairman of the Refugee Council of Australia, says he has no family in Kabul to go back to.

"The reasoning around the relocation to Kabul doesn't accord with the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) eligibility guidelines for protection in our view," she said in an interview with the ABC on Tuesday.

"Furthermore, he has vulnerabilities such as his age, his illiteracy, the fact that he has no contacts or relatives at all in Kabul and hardly any in Afghanistan [which] would make him a very serious consideration for complementary protection, and no reasons were given for refusing complementary protection."